I am an absolute newbie in Linux, and I am using Linux for last 2 weeks. I am using dual boot, with Windows Xp home edition in one partition, and Linux mint cassandra in another partition. I also have a fat32 partition, which I created so that I can access that from both the OS.Now the problem is, till yesterday my Linux was working very good, and I was really very happy with that.....Yesterday only I installed few updates given by Linux only and also I installed VLC player.........This is all I did yesterday.Today morning when I started my comp, I noticed that GRUB is taking more than usual time to load....(Around 2 minutes)It first shows GRUB 1.5, then around after 45 seconds another line comes saying GRUB is loading which takes around 1 and half minutes, then I see a list of OS from which I can choose to boot. The list is like this........

Also I want to ask, that before there was 2 rows of Linux Mint (I guess it was Linux mint 2.6.20-15 generic and second line was recovery mode).......So these are my problems........1.Why I am seeing 4 lines of Linux Mint now?? 2.Can they be removed and make to appear only 2 lines? (4 lines are bit annoying and confusing)........3. Again why GRUB is taking so much time to load? I remember very well that before it used to take hardly 5 or 10 seconds.4. Is there anything I can do to resolver this slow GRUB loading problem??

I have checked the space available in all the partitions. All of them have more than 50% memory empty. And the swap memory is also way more than double of my RAM.........So I don't think this could be at least because of less memory available for processing.

Some of my question may sound like novice, but I am one, so kindly bear that.

And please please do help me for the problems I mentioned above. Thanks in anticipation.

You've installed a new kernel2.6.20-16-genericThis may break X so you have no GUI. That's when the old kernel comes in handy, because you can boot it.Leave it as is. And it's probably just the first time it's slowIf you can't start X in 2.6.20-16-generic you can start 2.6.20-16 in Recovery mode and then install new drivers with Envy, provided you've got nvidia or ATI